Mort 1: Doomship Dilemma

You can discuss anything about fan-made Commander Keen games here.
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Levellass
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Post by Levellass »

But... how can that be? i disposed of him years ago!
What you really need, not what you think you ought to want.
Dr. Kylstein
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Post by Dr. Kylstein »

Little did you know, I escaped to another forum under an assumed identity! :mortlol

Just the other day I looked at my old files as a relic of a bygone age that would be forever incomplete. I had no idea it had already been completed! I love what you've done with it. Naturally it differs from what I had envisioned, but it also differs from what I would have actually produced by being much better! Playing it I had a bit of a rocky start (on my own levels!), but it's quite fun, and a very mind-expanding experience for someone who left when mods were still fairly imitative.

What I'm most curious about, now, is what transpired between my relic and this shiny gem. What inspired you to pick up my old work? How did you interpret it and decide where it ought to go? Of course, if you have any questions of your own, I'm eager to reveal all.
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Commander Spleen
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Post by Commander Spleen »

Little did you know, I escaped to another forum under an assumed identity! :mortlol
Woah, I did not see that one coming! This is more epic than the android dummy thing.
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Levellass
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Post by Levellass »

I really should have read that coded message I found on the back of the cereal box.

What I'm most curious about, now, is what transpired between my relic and this shiny gem. What inspired you to pick up my old work? How did you interpret it and decide where it ought to go? Of course, if you have any questions of your own, I'm eager to reveal all.
Your demo was one of the first good mods I ever played. (Ones that had graphics that stuck to the Keen 1-3 style and looked 'serious') I always thought 'Wow, this will be AWESOME!' and it had a website too, which was a novelty.

Of course, the months, then years went by and nothing happened and it faded from my memory. Every now and then however I would come across it in my mod collection and say to myself 'Wow, I hope that gets finished'

One day I was chatting with a friend who was doing something similar and we discussed it, and during that conversation I figured I could finish up that mod and merge it with his project. We could do so much more now than when you started, and I wanted something to test my mod making skills before I worked on Keen 4 (As you can see from my Candy Alpha, it wasn't my first mod, but it was the one I sharpened my skills on.)

I have never been good at story and plot, so what I decided was I would keep as much of your work as possible, only changing things to fit with what I added later. I figured nobody would complain, since you were in all likelihood dead. Basically it was a giant experiment, a 'let's see what we can do' using what you had done as a base.

I am curious as to just how you would have finished off the story had you completed this, and what things you would have done differently from me.
What you really need, not what you think you ought to want.
Dr. Kylstein
Vortininja
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Joined: Sat Feb 14, 2009 4:39

Post by Dr. Kylstein »

I think it's kind of ironic that you compliment me on keeping to the original trilogy style--I was trying really hard to mimic Keen 6. The limitations of the Vorticons engine are one of the reasons I stopped. In fact, I stopped to attempt re-creating the mod with Multimedia Fusion with re-colored Keen 4-6 graphics and liberal use of Gaussian blur filtering. I re-created the first level before deciding that the setting was too bland and changed it to the sequel mentioned in the mod's story. A tech demo was on my Spatang space for a while, but that project petered out too. In retrospect, I think my original mod had the superior graphics. Working with the small tiles made it easy to include lots of detail.

I had conceived of rather more violence. The failure of "nasty creatures" to fill the levels was due to laziness and lack of imagination, rather than an intent to focus on puzzles. Speaking of the clues at the end of the story, the supply ship explosion was meant to explain the goodies scattered around a place that hasn't hosted much sentient life (with the exception of the eyeball reliefs or their creators.) I also remember distinctly that Mort was going to have to deal with a Nutri-mat at some point, which would have been left in the wreckage. He was going to have to argue with it to get the Tea, just like Arthur Dent in Restaurant at the End of the Universe. I knew I couldn't really implement it though, so the floating plasma orb maze was an adlibed substitute.
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